About the Center for Disciplinary Innovation at the University of Chicago

In the 2007-2008 academic year, the University of Chicago and the Franke Institute for the Humanities will open the Center for Disciplinary Innovation (CDI). This new center is a direct result of work begun during the Franke Institute's three-year Mellon Project, "New Perspectives on the Disciplines: Comparative Studies in Higher Education" (2002-2006). The CDI will be a place for pedagogical collaboration and innovation at the graduate level, complementing both the undergraduate Big Problems curriculum and the graduate offerings of our departments. The CDI will offer team-taught courses at the graduate level with participating faculty from different disciplines. Unlike other programs in team teaching, this one will constitute the faculty participants as a fellowship, a group whose aim is to keep the larger disciplinary questions continually in focus. Two courses per quarter, or six over the year, will be supported. Among the twelve participating faculty each year, up to two from other universities may be invited.

CDI Courses 2008-2009

Announcing the following new courses for the 2008-2009 roster:

Autumn 2008

• Love's Books, Love's Looks: Textual and Visual Perspectives on the Roman de la Rose
  offered by Daisy Delogu (Romance Languages & Literatures) and Aden Kumler (Art History)

Winter 2009

• Composing Humans, 1760-1840
  offered by James Chandler (English) and Martha Feldman (Music)

Spring 2009

• The Noise of the Imperial City
  offered by Lars-Christian Koch (Cologne University, Ethnomusicology) and Philip Bohlman (Music)
• Poems and Songs
  offered by Travis Jackson (Music) and Robert von Hallberg (Comparative Literature)
• Translating Theory
  offered by Robert Bird (Slavic Languages & Literatures) and Loren Kruger (Comparative Literature)

About the Consortium of Centers for Disciplinary Innovation

In the 2006-2007 academic year, under the leadership of James Chandler, the Center for Disciplinary Innovation at the University of Chicago served as the leading force in the formation of a consortium of centers for disciplinary innovation, a partnership with humanities centers at Columbia, Cambridge, and Berkeley. Each humanities center has received support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The purpose of this consortium is to begin to address collectively a problem that we take to be of great significance for higher education in the coming decades. The problem is how universities of the twenty-first century ought best to respond to the challenge of disciplinary change in the humanities and social sciences (and beyond). The consortium will be especially well-positioned to try to make some headway with the large questions of disciplinary innovation in our time. Our four universities are known for their intense intellectual vitality, and for a willingness to reflect on the structures and procedures of academic knowledge production. Each institution will make its own experiments according to its own sense of its local strengths and distinctive contributions.

The Berkeley program focuses on disciplinary innovation in the undergraduate curriculum, by way of a new program tracing thematic “threads” that wind through multiple disciplines. The workshops would provide occasions for discussion and planning that would not only serve the immediate needs of undergraduate education at Berkeley but also deepen faculty interest in the larger questions at stake in the consortium project as a whole. The Columbia program is centered on a series of departmental retreats that will encourage reflection on the state of disciplines in these departments and the possibilities for new structures and linkages. The eventual goal behind these retreats is to help faculty gain a better and more self-conscious sense of their own contributions not merely to their 'subjects' but also to their 'disciplines.' The retreats would thus help shape their thinking towards joining our efforts to create innovative courses for both graduate and undergraduate education in the not too distant future. The Cambridge and Chicago proposals both focus on graduate education in the context of a series of research-oriented programs aimed precisely at the topics encompassed by “disciplinary innovation.” At Cambridge these programs are comprised under the three-year project on “Cultural Transmission, Disciplinary Change, and the Future University.” At Chicago, they were launched five years ago with “New Perspectives on the Disciplines: Comparative Studies in Higher Education.” The main components of the project will differ in detail from center to center, but the aim will be the same: to reflect and compare, and to embed disciplinary change within the wider landscape of the university at all levels by means of the Humanities Centers at each institution.